There was a time when "Geek" was far from a badge of honor. Jr. High School (AKA middle school) was developed specifically for the purpose of making geeks miserable. We were told that lockers were designed for holding books, lunches jackets, but in reality, the secret anti-geek coalition had lockers installed so geeks could be stuffed inside of them, or could have the doors slammed in their faces.

But, then something happened. While the world wasn't looking, a geek became the richest man in the world. Pro-nerd and pro-geek movies became popular. It became cool to claim to be a geek or a nerd. The problem is that there's a big difference between claiming the title "geek" and being given the title "geek."

Well, May 25th is Geek Pride Day. In honor of Intergalactic Geek Pride Day, I've put together a little quiz on the subject.

Questions:

Is it better to be considered a nerd, a geek or both?

What's the difference between a nerd and a geek?

Does the outside world know the difference between "nerd" and "geek" and thus does it matter which one you're called?

If you've never actually been called a geek, but claim to be a geek anyway, are you really a geek?

If a geek talks in the woods, but there's no one there to hear, did the geek actually speak?

If you can explain what you do for a living (or hobby) to a random stranger and have more than about one in fifty understand, can you still claim to be a geek?

If you don't have enough cables laying around the houses to connect just about any two pieces of computer / electronic equipment together, can you really claim to be a geek?

If you can't assemble a spare PC from parts you have around the house in about an hour, can you still claim to be a geek?

If you can't count in more than one base, can you still claim to be a geek?

If you don't love songs by Tom Lehrer, can you still call yourself a geek? (If you don't know who he is, quick: Youtube)

Bonus question:

Tesla or Edison?

Answers:

If you're a true geek, you already know the answers so I don't need to list them.

Duane BensonThe best revenge is not violence or deviousnessThe best revenge is to be happier...and to build robots for world domination

There were a number of interesting sessions and debates last week at the DesignWest show. One of the more passion filled, was on the value of Open Source hardware. Some people think it will save the world,if only everyone will do everything open source. Some people think it's a stupid waste of time without a real business model.

Personally, I see more value in it than either of those extremes. What I see is that open source hardware (and software) has lowered the barriers to entry for people who want to create, design, build and sell. Yes, big companies innovate, but a vast amount of innovation and employment comes from small companies that start out without anything more than ideas.

A decade ago, before open source hardware became well know, it was pretty difficult and expensive to start a hardware company. In fact, I recall quite a few predictions and discussions about the death of hardware as an industry in the country. Open source hardware has lowered the barriers to entry and raised the level of awareness of hardware to the point that now, in my opinion, the environment is as ripe for start-up companies and innovation as was the late 1970's and 1980's.

Open source hardware has given us that, and that will be far more positively economically impactfull than whether or not an specific business can find a way to make money with open source hardware. These new businesses may or may not sell open source hardware. Again, that's far less important than the fact that open source hardware has really enabled so many more people to create.

I wandered over to the Ti booth here at the Embedded Systems conference to check out the Beaglebone and the MSP430 Launchpad. We haven't built any Beaglebones yet, but a few years back we took the Open source Beagleboard files and built up a couple to show our Package on package (POP) workmanship. The Beaglebone doesn't use POP, but it is open source. As are the "Capes." They call their expansion cards capes. I get a vision of Underdog when I hear that name.

What caught my eye was their selection of Capes available now.All of those are open source. They provide functionality such as displays, battery power, CAN, prototyping and more.

The other product I looked at was the MSP430 Launchpad. I've been getting to know the launchpad myself and wanted to see what's new with it. The unit shown here has a DSP and a little display driven by the MSP430. It's a MP3 player with the purpose of introducing the DSP and MSP430 / DSP combination.

Ti is doing an amazing job of making evaluation of their chips easy and inexpensive. I've seen a few other companies providing more complete and less expensive than traditional dev boards as well. NXP with their LPC series to name one. It's a good idea and a good trend as far as I'm concerned.

It's day one here at the show. It's still mostly called ESC but they've included a number of other shows under the name Design West.

I haven't had a lot of time to run around yet, but I have run into two robots. The first one, over at the Intel booth, is based on an ATOM embedded motherboard and a Microsoft Kinect. I stopped to take a picture and it rolled over to visit. It tried to follow me when I left, but it's owner caught it before it got too far away. It's driven by an open source software suite and targeted at university programs. I didn't have time to get the details, but if you're here at the show, drop over and check it out. Just walk fast or it might try to tag along behind you

The second robot was at Ti. It didn't follow me, but it did balance on two wheels for me.

Yes, we show off sometimes. We show off and get self congratulatory and self promotional. 'Cause that's what tradeshows are all about. Well, they're about that, but they're also about meeting and listening to people and other good things. In any case, we are proud of what we do (otherwise I wouldn't be doing it) so we go to tradeshows and show off.

In March, we're going to the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, California. We'll be in booth number 1437 (map here). Show hours are as follows:

We always bring some samples of our work for people to hold on to. We've brought the two Beagleboards that we assembled and a few other pieces of our handiwork. It's cool to pick them up and hold them, but with parts so tiny, it's not easy to really see what you need to see from an assembler - the solder joints. So this year, we're bringing some big monitors and a USB microscope. I've got my eye on this one from Adafruit. As of this writing, it's out of stock, and I'm anxiously waiting for notice that it's back in stock.

We've been hanging out in Boston at the ESC show. Yesterday was a busy day with lot's to look at and lot's of folks at our booth. Some human, some not. The Freescale people, just a few booths down, brought along a tele-presence robot.

The little guy wanderd here and there a bit. It's a cool concept, but I think it didn't quite live up to it's potential. They really should have registered it as an attendee. It did have a little card hanging around it's neck, but I don't see why it couldn't have had a genuine show badge. If it were me, I would have had it actually stopping by booths, talking to people and collecting goodies.

Still, it was a fun demo and, presumably, an example of Freescale chips in action.

It's not quite grape power, but over in the Microchip booth, the EverReady folks were handing out little digital clock demos. Nothing sounds the least bit interesting about that, except what they're really showcasing is a little Microchip step-up DC-DC converter, the MCP1640. They're using that little chip and an Energizer 1.5V AAAA cell to power the chip at 3.3 volts.

Looking a little closer, it's a PIC16LF1933. On the other side of the battery, there's a set of six unpopulated pads labeled J1. I'm guessing that's the ICSP port. I do have MPLAB on my laptop here and I have my hand, dandy PicKit 3 with me as well. What I don't have with me is a soldering iron and a spare header... Actually, now that I think about it, I do have some six-pin headers down here with me. I might be able to put in into the PicKit and then just hold it tight to the solder pads. I'll probably sleep tonight though instead of staying up and writing something fun for this to do. I'd probably spend most of the night just trying to get the fuse bits figured out. A project for another day.